Friday, May 20, 2011

Obama still hasn't remembered me

When President Obama made his Cairo speech in 2009, the Egyptian-Jewish author Andre Aciman wrote a heart-felt piece for the New York Times : "the President forgot me," he complained. Standing in the heart of Cairo, where 80,000 Jews once lived, Obama forgot to mention Aciman and the other 800,000 Jewish refugees driven out of the Arab world.

President Obama's major foreign policy speech yesterday has already generated reams of analysis and megabytes of reaction. But no pundit has yet pointed out that once again Obama still hasn't remembered 'me' - he failed to mention Jewish refugees.

He referred to Palestinian refugees all right, as one of the 'emotional' issues that should be deferred in talks between Israel and Palestinians - ignoring the fact that all official documents and UN Security Council resolutions to-date talk of the rights of 'refugees', not just Palestinian refugees.

You might argue - how can one expect Obama to mention Jewish refugees when Benjamin Netanyahu himself, in his rebuttal to Mahmoud Abbas' op-ed in the New York Times, chose not to. Yet a source in the Prime minister's office has given us reason to believe that Netanyahu was originally going to mention 'two sets of refugees'.

With the notable exception of deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, the present Israeli government has made little public mention of Jewish refugees. And amid such high- level timidity, how can we expect the press and media to highlight the issue?

So once again, here are the main reasons why the Jewish refugees must be taken into account:

1. The ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab countries is proof of the Arab world 's longstanding nationalist and Islamist genocidal intentions against the Jews of the region, now focusing on the eradication of the world's only Jewish state.

2. The subjugated history of Jews under Muslim rule, their sporadic persecution and forced conversions vindicates the creation of a sovereign Jewish State.

3. The main issue on the Israel-Palestine peace agenda is the 'right of return'. The Jewish refugee issue neutralises the Palestinian 'right of return' by a) drawing attention to an exchange of refugee populations of roughly equal proportions by b) by positing a model of absorption and integration for Palestinian refugees denied basic civil rights in their host countries.

5 comments:

I think that some people in the Israeli govt wanted more or less to make certain points about the refugee issue. The Palestinian Arab refugees were the result, not the cause, of the Israeli war od Independence, which started with Arab aggression against Jewish civilians. In fact, that war against Israel created two refugee problems -- one Jewish, the other Arab. Israel absorbed over 600,000 Jewish refugees who were thrown out of Arab countries in the wake of the 1947=1949 Israeli war of independence. Another roughly 300,000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands were absorbed in other countries, such as France, Canada and the United States. Meanwhile, despite the Arab world’s vast territory and wealth, 600,000 Palestinian Arab refugees were not absorbed by the Arab states to which they fled. Instead, the refugees and their descendants have been used by the Arab leadership for four generations as a fake "moral" weapon against the Jewish state.

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)